May 29, 2012

CTA's new gem comes at quite a price; $38 million Morgan Station in the West Loop is dazzling to the eye and the pocketbook

A safe, clean, on-time ride. That's all most of us expect from the Chicago Transit Authority. But why not ask for something more? Station architecture that puts zing in the journey and elevates the city around it. That's what we get at the crisply modern new Morgan "L" station on Chicago's Near West Side.

The $38 million station, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel formally opened Thursday, serves the Pink and Green lines and can be found at Lake and Morgan streets, about half a mile west of the Ogilvie Transportation Center. But you're bound to see it before you get there.

The station's spectral stair towers and glass-sheathed transfer bridge rise airily above the hard-edged warehouses and cold meat lockers of the West Loop, also home to trendy restaurants and galleries. The area, it's been said, is in transition from slaughterhouses to art houses. The Oprah show may be gone, but the station is a new jewel in the West Loop's crown.

Indeed, it's so handsome that it's bound to spark debate about whether the money spent on it would have been put to better use fixing the CTA's creaking rails and maddening "slow zones." The construction was paid for by state and federal grants, as well tax increment financing funds meant to spur investment on the Near West Side. Yet as Tribune transportation writer Jon Hilkevitch noted in Friday's paper, the station followed, rather than fostered, the area's resurgence.

Designed by Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney, who has previously done fine renovations on the CTA's Fullerton, Belmont and Grand stations on the Red Line, Morgan is the first brand-new CTA elevated station in Chicago in 15 years.

The last one, which opened in 1997 at State and Van Buren streets, apes the heavy-handed, postmodern design of the Harold Washington Library Center. This one reflects a different time, technology and creative spirit.

It is Barney's best transit project to date and sets a high bar for her next CTA project, a new $50 million Green Line station at Cermak Road that will serve people going to McCormick Place.

Barney's big move makes a virtue of a tightly constructed site along the Lake Street elevated line, portions of which had to be structurally reinforced to carry the loads from the station's 425-foot-long platforms.

A conventional mezzanine, where passengers would climb and pay fares before ascending to the platforms, was ruled out. It would have obstructed truck traffic. Instead, Barney and her project architect, Ryan Giblin, did something unconventional.

To the north and south of the elevated, they stacked a 40-foot-tall slab, sheathing it in glass and panels of perforated stainless steel. Each slab contains a ground-level station house, stairs leading to a platform and an elevator that takes riders to the platforms and a glass-enclosed bridge connecting them. The outcome succeeds as urban design and architecture.

There is no facile attempt here to mimic the muscular brick structures of nearby lofts and warehouses. The boxy slabs have the right toughness for the neighborhood, yet by virtue of their height, transparency and glinting presence, they give it something fresh. Large-scale stainless steel signs, proclaiming "CTA" atop the slabs and "Morgan Station" on the sides of the elevated structure, make the station easy to identify from afar.

The architecture follows in the Chicago tradition of elevating construction to art. Computer-etched patterns on the perforated steel panels suggest the shadows cast by the elevated structure on the street below. Inside, the station houses are pleasantly transparent. Above them, one encounters tall shafts of sky-lighted space, enlivened by structural columns and beams, stair railings and other features, even drain pipes, organized in a precisely honed machine aesthetic.

The platforms are also well-detailed. Translucent canopies admit natural light to the platforms while thin pairs of steel columns nicely culminate in fins -- an improvement on the squarish canopy supports at the Belmont and Fullerton stations.

The glass-sheathed sky bridge isn't bad either, even though its structural members are too bulky. It's fully enclosed from the weather and offers drop-dead views of Willis Tower and the downtown skyline.

Tying all the elements together, a rounded, horizontal band of florescent lights runs from the station house to the sky bridge. Once it's working (only some of the lights are operating now), it should help riders to navigate the space intuitively.

All this would be meaningless if Barney had not managed to synthesize the essential demands of function with the station's forms. But she's done that, the result of years of experience -- and frustration -- with the transit bureaucracy.

On the platforms, for example, she tucks conduits for electric lines and other utilities between the columns, forgoing the visual clutter one frequently encounters at CTA stations. She's thought through maintenance too. The hard-to-reach exterior of the sky bridge's glass can be power-washed from below.

Still, the public has every right to ask: Why $38 million for a CTA station? And the tab for Morgan could go higher. The eastern end of the platforms still needs canopies.

Barney's response is that the job had to be carried out while CTA trains were still running, stretching out the schedule and adding to labor costs. The need for durable, low-maintenance materials, such as stainless steel, also drove up the price. The job, she said, came in on budget.

With the CTA's aging infrastructure facing a never-ending series of maintenance problems, the issue of renovating or building stations versus repairing rails isn't going to go away. But a station this elevating reminds us that good design must remain part of the equation as Chicago grapples with the enormous task of bringing its antiquated transit system into the 21st century.

(Tribune photos by Chuck Berman)

Posted at 10:02:38 AM

Comments

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THANK YOU for bringing some attention to the stratospheric price tags on new L stations. Are the handrails being custom-milled from unobtainium? Something somewhere is very wrong when a simple L station costs $50 million, twice what Michael Jordan's Highland Park estate will sell for. Divide $50 million by the modest number of expected new riders at Cermak and I believe it would be cheaper to send limos to pick them up every day. These kinds of boondoggles are easy pickings for those who already resent paying for public transit.

The writer says that the station is very economically and rationally designed, while also looking great then makes a big issue of the cost without saying what a transit station should cost. As an architect working on an elevated transit station, the cost seems well within typical costs. This is not building a mansion in suburb but a very complicated elevated structure on either side of an ooperating rail line and over a street, with elevators, escalators, safety features to accomodate thousands of people a day. Plus it has to last for decades if not a century with minimal maintenance. And most of the building materials are required by law to come from the US. Good job Carol Ross Barney (no I don;t work there).

I do agree that some are too quick to pounce on costs without providing context. For many, they simply see the word "million", and it makes no difference if its 5 million or 40 million, its just a big number to them and deserving of outrage. And I can sympathize, because most people have no way to comprehend what goes into an infrastructure project.

That being said, I do think the US has a serious problem with how much it takes to build infrastructure, especially when you look at European and Asian countries who are often able to build something comparable for far cheaper. We also have a serious problem with build quality, despite the amount spent. One simply has to look at the mess that was the Brown Line reconstruction. All that money, and yet we couldnt afford full awnings over platforms, or benches to sit on. And speaking of platforms, gotta love how all the wood is being replaced after only 2 years because they weren't sealed properly. Its things like this that sow distrust among the general public.

BK: The CTA has had a several decades long problem with designing & building stations that function properly from a user's standpoint or for that matter, common sense operations from a maintenance standpoint.
They don't seem to understand that spending a bit more in capital funds, a substantial part coming from the federal government, will save them from spending so much in operating funds, which come from the farebox, the 1% RTA sales tax & begging in Springfield.
The feds require that anything built with their money last for 75 years.
So they rebuilt the South Side Green Line in the 1990s, but built these absurd stations at Indiana, 43rd, 47th, 51st & Garfield. The L runs in an alley there, but they didn't bother to spend some extra money moving one track over so a center island platform could be built in those locations, thus saving money for decades on elevator maintenance, only one necessary for an island, instead of two or three No extra stairways or bridges would have been built, along with the lighting costs, etc. There was plenty of room at all of these stations to do so. A single platform is also more secure for the passengers waiting as there will be more people on a shared platform than two separate ones.
Soon, the CTA will start building a new station at Cermak on the Green Line will be a center platform, but it will be two end to end single platforms like the absurdity of Loyola!

As for Morgan, I wonder how much more it would have cost to engineer & replace a single section of both tracks so a mezzanine could have been squeezed under there.
A few years ago, the totally rebuilt the 35th/Dan Ryan station. Totally!
It took forever.
But now it's on the wrong side of 35th from the new Sox Park, which was already built.
Or worse, the rebuilt Sedgwick station. There used to be two platforms there serving all four tracks. Instead of rebuilding the outer two tracks for the distance of the platforms & removing the two inner tracks for a new island platform, the CTA did its usual idiocy & condemned land next door by eminent domain, driving out a couple of thriving businesses so that a two platform station could be built there replacing the two outer tracks!
Incompetence on a level that just can't be believed unless you saw it in action!
There are so many ludicrous things that the CTA does at other stations, it would take me an hour to type it all up, so I won't.